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Crystals In Wine?
My father-in-law made wine, and years later he gave me a bottle. It was a white wine and it had crystals in it which I assumed was from the sugar.
I drank the wine and enjoyed it, although I don't suppose it would have won any awards with the experts.
Have you had this happen much with your batches or commercially made wine?
Never happened anything like that with me. I have never seen any crystals in wine. May be those crystals had been freezed wine.
In this case, the crystals were still there at room temperature, and I'm sure the wine never froze in storage, because the bottle didn't break or leak.
Wow that would be amazing. I haven't tried any either like that.
Just to clear things up, most likely the crystals "wine diamonds" are tartaric acid crystals that have fallen out of the wine when it was cooled(solutions are not as soluble at colder temperatures) The crystal are just cream of tarter cystals and do not effect the flavor of the wine besides softening the acidic flavor. They are harmless and the wine can be decanted off of the crystals.
Actually saw this for the first time in my white wine that I bottled this year as well. ace is right, it didn't contribute any flavors.
I work at a wine store in Washington state, and we periodically see those crystals pop up in our white wines. From a sales point of view, it really only shows which wines are small run or from boutique wineries. From what I understand, many of the bigger wine producers cold-stabilize their whites, and then filter those crystal out, which is why you don't see it often in large-production wines.
Some of our customers are turned off by them, but I've had several bottles with crystals in them and they really change very little about the wine.
-R
Rubber is right. Most commercial wine Cold-Stabilize to prevent "wine diamonds". I do this to all my wines. Cold stabilizing drops the crystals out in the carboy and can then be racked off of them. Along with dropping out the crystals, the acidic flavor is slighly cut down because the crystals are cream of tartar, which forms from tartaric acid in the wine. A way to induce the wine diamonds to fall out during cold stablizing is to "seed" the wine with cream of tartar crystals. Then, put the carboy for 3-4 weeks in your garage in the late fall (30-40 F). I actually converted a mini fridge to be able to fit a 6-gallon carboy which is alot easier.
A little piece of trivia...John Baptiste Bion discovered those crystals of tartaric acid on a wine cork and studied them under a microscope, saw that they rotated polarized light. Louis Pasteur then isolated a pure sample and saw that they were asymmetrical. Now you see that information tucked into many things related to biosynthesis, such as d- and l- series amino acids and proteins.
I think more than affecting the flavor of wine, they affect the mouthfeel of it, along with a few other acids.
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